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Amazon's Astro robot has a fascinating origin story, and the lead UX sound designer who shaped its personality is telling it. The challenge wasn't building features — it was giving a machine something resembling a soul. How do you make a camera on wheels feel trustworthy inside your home? The answer, it turns out, was almost entirely in sound design.
Shifting to payments, GoMining is taking direct aim at Jack Dorsey's Square with a new bitcoin payment protocol called GoBTC Pay. The company has opened up a software development kit so merchants can accept bitcoin for everyday purchases. Whether that moves the needle on mainstream crypto adoption remains the real question — infrastructure is one thing, habit change is another.
And finally, a quieter but genuinely useful development for developers and presenters alike. A blog post making rounds describes a method for achieving in-situ syntax highlighting inside macOS applications like Keynote — the kind of workflow friction that anyone who has ever pasted code into a slide deck will immediately recognize. Small fix, real pain point.
That's the day in tech. Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
